by Lucy Ellmann
I liked these gals, and was pleased for Bee that she’d known them: the Champagne Girls were truly nice to me, and saw me through that terrible night. In retrospect, I think they must have been driven to become exceptionally nice, to compensate for the exceptional nastiness of Canterbury: everything must have its opposite and antidote.
Hungry and hungover the next day, I went for a walk in what seemed to be Canterbury’s only real park, the Westgate. It was full of winos and wedding parties, and featured the most unhealthy-looking tree I’d ever seen. The trunk was squat and bulbous, and covered in carbuncles—its bark looked like bubbling lava, frozen mid-eruption into a pretense of wood. Branches stuck out above at odd angles in all directions, and from their tips hung a million little brown balls. What fresh hell was this?
A kid caught me staring at it and told me the tree had long ago eaten a bench that used to be at its base. In my present agitated state, I immediately imagined it consuming an old couple sitting on the bench as well, as they innocently marveled at its ugliness.
I went on beside the shallow meandering river until the path became muddy and sylvan. I had to duck under huge willows, their trunks twisted in ancient agony, like squeezed-out laundry. I was composing a Canterbury chant for myself as I trudged.
Who took the cunt out of
Canterbury Kent?
Guys yell “Cunt!” from their cars in
Canterbury Kent.
Count the corpses in
Canterbury Kent.
They litter the countryside in
Canterbury Kent.
It’s all buns and guns and whoresons by the ton, in
Canterbury Kent.
Christians concentrate on cant in
Canterbury Kent.
The cuntstabulary can’t cuntrol
Canterbury Kent.
Men hunt women down without relent in
Canterbury Kent.
So who took the cunt out of
Canterbury Kent?
Who took the CUNT out of
CANTerbury KENT?
The rugged path suddenly turned into a fancy new cycle route through semi-wilderness. It was dotted with fuzzy brown caterpillars that I tried to avoid stepping on. The sun was low and a bend of the river gleamed in the distance like a knife. There was no sound but birds, and my steps, and a dog barking at his own echo under a railway bridge. And then I could go no further, because the path was sealed off with twisting police tape: “ENTER CRIME SCENE DO NOT… ”
I had hit upon it myself, by accident: the spot where Bee had died! No one could see or stop me, so I stepped inside the taped-off area and sank to my knees, searching for any trace of her, even blood—head wounds bleed—but they’d washed it away, or rain had. The thought of her lying there, in pain, completely maddened me—Bee, whose sculptures were devoted to pleasure! I looked around at what Bee must have seen last before she died—the field, the low line of trees around it, the river, the sun, the sky?—and I wondered again what she thought at the end. Did she just give up, deciding life isn’t worth living, in a world in which such things happen?
But she was wrong, WRONG. Golden light was hitting the opposite riverbank, and the green and gold trees were doing their reflection trick in the river, as if to say: I can face up or down, in a world that is both this and that. The water was clean and clear enough for ducks, who tootled to and fro, the Appassionata was playing in my head, and I longed to tell Bee that there’s Bach and Beethoven and birds and bees and MIMI, Bee, Mimi, the greatest thing.
Don’t give up, Bee, don’t give up! The world needs to be BETTER, not gone.
My feet dragged all the way back through the park. How was I going to go on without Bee? How was I even going to get past the Cankerberry Tree, or “Onion Corner,” without dying?
The heat was getting to me. Them and their heat wave! I stood for a while by the entrance gate to catch my breath. Some people had gathered on the bridge and were pointing down at something in the water. Another ditched shopping cart or baby buggy? Once they’d gone, I went over to see what they were all so fascinated by, and found two small naked female figures, carved in stone. Lithe, young, smooth-skinned girls, less than life-size. They lay stretched out on their backs under the surface of the water, their heads resting on their raised arms, ankles crossed—and they looked happy, relaxed, as if they were enjoying the sensation of the water flowing down their bodies and the weeds slowly brushing against them. They looked content to stay there forever, unfazed by being underwater, unfazed even by death.
A plaque on the bridge confirmed the sculptor’s name—Bridget Hanafan—and the title: Bradbridge’s Widow, Wilson’s Wife.
My last morning in Canterbury, I thought I’d do the hotel manager a favor by telling him about the failing toilet in my room—sotto voce, to save him and his breakfasters any embarrassment.
“Your toilet?” he responded in mock surprise. “Your toilet’s not working?” I recognized that tone of disapproval tinged with hysteria, from all the laminated signs that lay in wait for you throughout the hotel. If it even was a hotel—seemed more like a boardinghouse to me.
The total silence among the hotel guests at their little tables suggested they were busily envisioning a nice English toilet bowl besmirched and clogged by my oafish American turds, while the manager kept tsk-tsking and banging stuff around irritably on his desk. “Your toilet… your toilet… ” he grumbled. I just stood there, astounded. Surely other toilets had broken down at some point in this shithouse? Finally, he said he’d have a “look” at it later, sighing deeply—the horror, the horror. That’s when I flipped.
“Look, it’s not my toilet, you ass, it’s yours. And as far as I’m concerned you can shove that stupid head of yours right in it, or I’ll do it for you, and then you can have a really good ‘look at it,’ what do you say?”
I slapped some money down on the reception desk, grabbed my suitcase and left, slamming the door behind me loud enough to shake those toast racks good. On my way out, I caught sight of one of the laminated signs and decided, for the benefit of others, to hang it on the front door of the hotel:
DO NOT DISTURB
On the sidewalk I nearly bumped into a strange young woman with two great big pink dots painted on her cheeks. She had quite an outlandish get-up on, involving several brightly colored dresses over a couple pairs of baggy pants, and she was wheeling a stroller full of empty plastic bags. She looked like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And then I suddenly remembered Bee telling me about a sort of miswhelped Molly Malone who wandered the streets of Canterbury all day and was never seen without that stroller full of junk. Bee had seen her once in the public library, asking for a map: “Not a map of everything, just the universe we live in. Where would I find that?”
GOOD QUESTION.
MEMORIAL DAY
So I escaped Angstland and the Anguish, and returned to New York with my sister’s ashes, my cozy bird’s nest, and one remaining hope: Mimi. I felt pretty confident about it. All I had to do was explain. Mimi wouldn’t desert me now, just because she’d caught me squirming around on the floor with my ex (once!). No, my baby would rush to my side!
Mimì! Mimì! rang in my head now, even more than Bee. But I measured time by the hours (three hundred and eleven) and days (ten) since I’d last spoken to Bee, how long it was since she’d died (a week), and how long since I hugged her in the hospital (six days). It all went through my head on a continuous random loop, and I still thought Bee couldn’t be dead. I had her ashes with me and I didn’t think she was dead.
Bubbles greeted me joyfully. Deedee had kept her well fed. She was plumper than ever! And Gertrude too was “there for me.” She seemed to view my sister’s violent end as a chance for us to get back together. She’d besieged my answering machine with so many sickening messages of condolence, I had to call her just to get her to quit it.
“You can’t help me,” I told her.
“But did you see that fabulous obit in t
he Times?” She made an obituary sound like a rave review. “Bridget was such a wonderful artist, Harrison!”
Huh? If she’d thought that, why didn’t she give her the grant she needed when Bee asked for one, thereby saving her from going to England at all? But there was no point in berating old Gertrude. she never listened. Even if I accused her of being the cause of all world suffering (which she probably was), she’d see it as some kind of sexual overture. Bee’s death was a foothold for Gertrude. But anyone who saw my sister’s death as a foothold was an oaf, and I’d had enough of Gertrude’s oafishness and her overtures. Life is short.
Next I had to go meet Bee’s dealer at the 2nd Avenue Deli (which was now on 3rd because the owner was shot by some bastard, on his way to the bank with the deli takings some years before). Bee’s dealer was arranging a memorial for Bee in his gallery. He wanted to talk about that and also a major retrospective of Bee’s work that he was planning. He needed the keys to her studio in Queens quick, and wanted to see all the stuff she’d been doing in “Can’t-Bury,” as he pronounced it, as soon as it arrived.
“There’s quite a buzz, uh, right now,” he told me, cramming a whole pastrami on rye into his face, mit pickle.
I hadn’t met the guy before but had never liked the sound of him. He’d once passed Bee over when he had a big commission to hand out, dropped her in favor of some jerk who did big geometric constructions in welded metal. It’s no fun being forgotten by your dealer (nor having to hear Bee cry about it over the phone). But now was not the time to berate him either. It was good of him to handle the memorial thing, and he’d be better at it than I. What was Bee’s favorite drink, he wanted to know. Champagne cocktail, I told him, remembering her socking them back like there was no tomorrow, whenever she got the chance. He’d also hired a string quartet and asked me what I’d like them to play. I suggested Bach solo violin partitas, and Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”—just to make sure the whole occasion finished me off.
Then I went home to hide from the disaster area my life had become: Gertrude and her mania for me; the imminent arrival of a million boxes of Bee’s stuff from Can’t-Bury; the imponderable problem of my joyless job (which could only be put on hold for so long, without some bozo beefing about it); and the débâcle with Mimi.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree
Deedee could handle the boxes, I realized, Deedee of the true compassion, and I could take a few weeks off. I would go to Sagaponack and take fresh breaths whenever opportunity allowed.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.
A different metaphysical plane, different “pace o’ life”. A different pace! What does that mean? Everybody on Long Island was always burbling about the “pace o’ life”. It drove me crazy! For me, Sagaponack was just a place to hide for a while, me and my cat. No TV News (no TV!), no Gertrusions (once I’d unplugged the phone), no responsibilities, no friends, no nothing. It’s an evolutionary achievement in animals to know when to flee. I fled.
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
INNISFREE
Bubbles and I arrived under cover of darkness, so as to avoid the curiosity and coffee cake of neighbors. I brought my own supplies, saving me from the general store: everybody’s so palsy-walsy in there it makes you sick. Once a year these millionaires turn up and go feral in the countryside, getting in tune with nature. Most people can’t get away from nature fast enough—this is why we built cities, for chrissake—but these guys with their brand-new jogging shorts, and the women with their bijou, flower-printed wheelbarrows, think they have an in with the elements. Aw, get your asses back to New York before you do something unecological you’ll regret!
A woman came from Cold Spring Harbor once a month to keep an eye on the place, so the house was in good shape, and there was plenty of dry firewood on the porch. I set Bubbles up with a cushion in front of the woodstove in the living room, and she licked herself happily there, so plump now that her backside was half on, half off the cushion. I buried my face in her fur for a while.
I’d never intended to have a house on Long Island. Gertrude convinced me, and then dolled it up in so many rag rugs, colonial curios and free-floating hunks of fabric, I couldn’t bring myself to enter the place until I got the Cold Spring Harbor woman to come take it all away. Gertrude had even managed to give the kitchen table a paunch, shrouding it in a stiff shiny tablecloth that draped to the floor. Gertrude’s idea of decor is that if you can make it from one side of the room to the other without falling over, something’s wrong. Her and her sarongs and her stupid baskets of shells and $300 beach towels, on which she lay in torpor for hours and wanted me to do the same! I’d finish the New York Times and want to go home, but by then Gertrude would have oiled herself up for a day’s broiling and be too slippery to move. Her approximations of seaside contentment were truly dispiriting.
Now alone in the house, I was free to lie in bed all day if I wanted to. But Ant wasn’t happy in his bed. Is it good for a fitted sheet to be so tight that every stitch of the seams stretches and strains around you all night, begging for mercy? Insomnia and its attendant hypochondria ensued, including heart fluttering, abdominal pain, sore throat and general malaise. I thought I had prostate cancer for about an hour there, followed by the usual tinnitus scare. Me on my taut bed! Who’d I think I was, PROUST?
And still to me at twilight came horizontal thoughts leading nowhere. Mimì! Mimì! I wanted to call her, but as time went on it was getting harder and harder to imagine explaining things. And now I couldn’t eat or sleep or think (and was probably getting a cold). Why bother her? Mimi no longer trusted me, and I felt in no condition to assure anybody of my innate goodness: I was just a zhlub who let my sister languish and die (on foreign soil!), a work-shirking saw-bones, held in contempt by his colleagues. Some lover-boy.
The next morning, I stood in bare feet on my bare floorboards, and stared out at the windswept trees. I tried listening to Heifetz play the Bach solo partitas, but the music skinned me alive. It felt like bee in the raw, pleading for help! I hid from Bee, hid from everything. Even the sun seemed threatening. It skulked around outside, sneaking peeks at me from behind bushes, then would pop out unexpectedly and blind me. If I didn’t let it in the front, it crept around the side. Leave me alone, wouldja?
Just walk, I told myself, try to take in one sound, one color, before you go in. But all I heard were rabid gulls squabbling over some unspeakable delicacy, and all I saw was what I thought was a shark—it turned out to be a leaf fragment on my sunglasses. The ocean was a barroom brawl, with waves tripping over themselves to get in on the action. The shoreline was a series of mini-Niagaras. You’d think water would have worn away all opposition by now, but it seemed to like being thwarted, turning white with delight when it hit anything unerodible.
The wingnut waterfalls of the world.
Long tubular waves rolled in. The rhythm of it, the drama, as those tunnels curled, crested, and crashed. Hard to believe the sea wasn’t trying to tell me something, each wave like a line of words or music.
I searched the beach for a message in a bottle, something, anything! And did find a few geological wonders: tough blades of grass growing through sand and, in a secluded spot sheltered from millionaires, a Zen garden of evenly spaced round stones, all the same size and each sitting snugly in its own wind-worn cleft, with a miniature peak of sand behind: my melancholy meadow.
I puzzled over the colors of the Sound. They kept changing for no perceptible reason, from turquoise to gray to Venetian green. It didn’t seem to relate directly to the color of the sky; unpredictable factors were at play. But why should some schmuck, some schlemiel from the city be able to “predict” anything out here?
I didn’t know the names of most of the birds I saw, I couldn’t tell what the clouds were up to, or remember which kind they were. It was all a big mystery to me. I wasn
’t even completely sure if there was quicksand on Long Island or not. But what’s a walk without a little danger?
Home to Bubbles and Glenn Gould. I once told Bee I thought Gould was playing one passage of The Well-Tempered Clavier too fast.
“Aw, leave him alone. The guy’s a genius! He can do what he wants,” she’d answered.
“Even the humming?”
“Even the humming.”
And she was right. I made him play The Well-Tempered Clavier to me again and again, until all I could hear were the harmonics.
I get up in the morning and think of women. Not about sex (that was very far from my mind) but about the many breakfasts women have made me, starting with my mom and moving through just about every female acquaintance I ever had. They all want to feed you! Bee used to make me the best scrambled eggs when we were kids, and she didn’t even like eggs.
I go downstairs and think of women, the many women I’ve drunk coffee with—and the many mornings I’ve drunk coffee alone, thinking about women.
I make toast for myself and think of women, in particular the problematic properties of my mother’s toastings. She never distributed the butter evenly, so you’d get this big glop of half-melted butter in the first bite, then none the next! She also cut my toast into squares, when all the cool moms were doing triangles. But then there was her jam, which none of the other moms could offer. Peach, plum, strawberry, rhubarb, strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry, blackberry, boysenberry, pear and cinnamon, apricot and almond, plum and cardamom, sweet cherry, sour cherry, dense dark marmalade, even tomato jam, green and red. (Mom and her ’maters!) And dilly beans. Nevermore, nevermore.
I do some laundry and think of women, my mom again, who did the laundry for fifty years until it finally killed her—falling down the stairs on her way to transfer stuff to the dryer. But how vigorous she was, plowing on all those years with my father panting and ranting at her heels, working his way through a million temper tantrums he always considered legitimate.